MailChimp Automation Guide

Section 1: Automation Section

About

Using plugins with CMS such as Magento / WordPress enables us to send our order information to MailChimp, with this, we can create very professional and easy to create Automatic Emails based upon the customer’s experience on your website and for different triggers such as the customer subscribing to your mailing list, or buying a certain product.

For this guide, we are going to use the example that you want to set up a an automated email to email your customer after 3 months of purchasing a specific product.

Login

If you don’t currently have an account with MailChimp you’ll need to set one up. Go to http://mailchimp.com and log in/sign up with the details that you initially set up your mail chimp account with.

Navigation

Once you’ve been brought into MailChimp after logging in you’ll need to look at the top menu and press “Automation” to get the section required to create automated workflows.

Section 2: Workflow Creation

List Selection

Now that we’re within the Automation Management page, press “Create Automation Workflow”, this will take us to the page needed to set up our Automatic Emails.

You’ll now be brought to a page that requires you to select a list followed by the type of automation required, this this case we need to press “Specific Product Purchase”.

Configuration

Setup

We will now be brought to a configuration page, this will allow us to set the Workflow Details, Fill in the fields such as Workflow Name ECT, and please read through all the options and select which ones apply to your needs. Once done, select next at the bottom of the page to continue to the next configuration step.

Trigger

The trigger is setting up the conditions for this workflow to send, this one is going to be when a user purchases a specific product, so please select this from the list and press next.

Emails

Now that you’ve set up the triggers and conditions, you’ll need to setup emails, this will allow you to send different types of emails based on different conditions (3 months since order placed etc). You can select either 1 email or 3, if we’re only going to send 1 email to the customer, then simply select 1 whereas if you are going to email the customer over different time periods, 3 months, 6 months and 9 months then you’ll want to add multiple emails to this workflow.

Once you’ve added this you’ll be able to add a delay to the automation, this will enable you to set a time for when you want the email to send E.G 3 months after the product has been purchased.

After you’ve changed the delay, you can then press “Design Email”, which will take you you to a bunch of steps allowing you to configure the email we’re going to automate.

Section 3: Automated Email Creation

Step 1: Details

Once you’ve pressed design email you’ll be taken to a page that requires basic email information.

The first page is pretty self explanatory, you’ll just need to fill into the details of the email.

Name your email: This is an internal reference.
Email Subject: The subject of the email you are going to send
From Name: The name of the sender.
From Email Address: The email of the sender.

Once you’ve filled in all this information press next to go to the next step.

Step 2: Template.

The template section gives you a range of different templates such as 1 column template with image and text, or just textual based template. Select the type of newsletter layout you want to send and you will be brought to the next page.

Step 3: Design

This step will allow you to customize the email to your needs, to add content boxes you simply drag a section from the right hand side into the preview of the newsletter. You can also change colours and design the newsletter based on your website’s primary and secondary colours.

Add your content and change the newsletter to your requirements then press next to go the next step.

Step 4: Scheduling / Segmentation

If you want to change anything else such as when the email is sent after the Work Flow trigger (3 months has passed since original order) you can do this here, generally with the type of automation we are setting up, this will not be needed.

Once you’ve filled in all the details, you’ll either be brought to a page that requests you resolve some issues with the workflow or email, please follow and rectify these issues otherwise the email will not send and your workflow may not be created.

If this is not the case, press the next button and you should be brought to a review page. Enabling you to review the options you’ve selected and the emails you’ve created for the workflow. If you’re unsure about how the email will look or want to quickly double check the content you’ve placed on the email then press “Send a test email” and go through that process before confirming the workflow.

Please review all of these steps to ensure they are 100% correct and to your requirements then proceed to press “Start Workflow”.

Your workflow should now be setup correctly, and users should start receiving the automated emails you’ve set up based on the parameters you’ve set.